In 2014 we published an article on the fast food workers’ struggles in the USA, ‘Capitalist astro-turfing finds its way to the trade unions [1]’, () by a comrade in the USA who appeared to share our view of the trade unions as organs of capitalist control. Subsequently the comrade has revised his view of the trade union question and has asked us to debate this with him. The following response, written by a close sympathiser, is an initial contribution to a discussion which we think is a central one for revolutionaries.  

Response to comrade mhou on the pamphlet Class, Bureaucracy and the Union-Form

"The catastrophe of the imperialist war has completely swept away all the conquests of trade union and parliamentary struggles. For this war itself was just as much a product of the internal tendencies of capitalism as were those economic agreements and parliamentary compromises which the war buried in blood and muck.” (Manifesto of the Communist International, 1919)

Introduction

The following is intended as an initial response to comrade mhou’s text Class, Bureaucracy and the Union-Form (CBUF)[1], with the aim of developing the discussion he has invited on the ICC’s forum.

The comrade directs his text “against the core left communist theories of the class struggle and by extension the trade union question”, and specifically against the position defended by the ICC, among others, that in the current historic period – the period of capitalism’s decadence – the trade unions have become integrated into the capitalist state.[2] Rather than setting out his specific criticisms of these “core left communist theories”, or showing why he thinks they are wrong, instead the comrade offers us his own alternative theory, summarised in a set of theses and illustrated by episodes from the history of the American unions from their origins up to the present day

So what, in essence, is the comrade’s argument?

1. That trade unionism is simply the organised form of the struggle of the working class in capitalism, representing the permanent tendency within capitalism for workers to combine to resist the attacks of capital against their wages and conditions;
2. That tendencies for  the trade unions to become bureaucratised or to defend reactionary policies are inherent in the nature of this struggle - but so are tendencies for them to become centres of workers’ resistance against capitalism, even today;
3. Ultimately, under the leadership of its political party, the working class organised in trade unions will seize and wield state power – which we could summarise in the formula: trade unions + the political party of the class = workers’ state.

But in many ways it is what the comrade does not say in this text that is more revealing. In fact the list of key issues that we might expect to be addressed in a Marxist theory on the trade union question is a long one, including:

• the significance of the growth of reformism in the 19th century workers’ movement
• the phenomenon of the mass strike at the start of the 20th century and the appearance of soviets or workers’ councils
• the betrayal of the trade unions at the start of WW1 and their mobilisation of the workers for global imperialist war
• the role of the trade unions as the spearhead of the bourgeois counter-revolution, especially in Germany, and the formation by militant workers of organisational alternatives to the trade unions
• tendencies for workers to take control of their own struggles outside of and against  trade union control through mass assemblies, unofficial strike committees, etc.

Decadence

The real ‘elephant in the room’ here of course is the concept of capitalist decadence. Against the persistent tendency in the revolutionary milieu today to question or openly reject capitalist decadence, the ICC has many times shown that this concept is simply the concretisation of historical materialism in the analysis of capitalism as a historically transitory mode of production.[3]   It’s therefore indispensable for understanding the historical period we are living in, and how to act as revolutionaries.

When prompted, the comrade has confirmed that his text is “primarily against the political positions derived from the conception of decadence.” While he agrees that the “material basis for socialism and the placement of proletarian revolution on the agenda were signaled by events in the class struggle (exemplified by the Paris Commune and October Revolution…)”, he does not agree with the political positions derived from this by the “contemporary or historic communist left”.[4]

So communism has been on the agenda since at least the October Revolution but the comrade sees no political implications for the class struggle or the trade unions in this momentous change of conditions for the two historic classes; or at least none important enough to mention in his theory.

The basic Marxist position on decadence is quite clear: at a certain stage of their development the productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production; from being forms of development, these relations turn into fetters on the forces of production. Then a period of social revolution is opened up, leading either to the transformation of society or to the mutual ruin of the contending classes.

For the “material basis for socialism” to exist, therefore, capitalist relations must have become a definitive fetter on the further development of human productive forces. Since at the same time capitalism is a dynamic system that must continue to extract profit in order to survive, it is forced to reproduce itself through the increasing destruction of the productive forces; either directly through wars, or indirectly through growing waste, debt, attempts to cheat the law of value, etc, and by adopting a series of increasingly drastic palliatives to prolong its life and ensure growing accumulation - palliatives that can only worsen its historic crisis in the longer term.

But capital is above all a social relationship, in which the bourgeoisie is forced to take into account the struggle of the proletariat in everything it does. With the “material basis for socialism” already negating its historically progressive character, and faced with the conscious revolutionary attempts of its gravedigger, above all in the October Revolution, capital must ensure its reproduction through the permanent and conscious suppression of the proletarian threat. We can see this most clearly in the way it was forced to unite across the battlefields of WW1 to crush the revolutionary wave, especially in Russia and Germany, but the lessons it learned from this experience were not lost; they were embedded in the development of state capitalism in the 20th century and especially in those organs charged with dealing with the proletarian threat; the left parties and the trade unions. 

So either the comrade believes that the material basis for socialism exists without capitalist relations having become a definitive fetter - in which case he needs to explain how and why this can be the case from a Marxist perspective - or he accepts that they have become a fetter, in which case he needs to explain the political implications of such a fundamental change for his theory of trade unionism.

Bureaucracy, reformism and state capitalism

Not only does the comrade avoid any mention of decadence in his text, he also avoids any analysis of the underlying tendency towards state capitalism which underpins the betrayal of the trade unions and their integration into the capitalist state apparatus. Instead, he argues that tendencies for the trade unions to become bureaucratised or to defend reactionary policies are inherent in the class struggle in capitalism from its origins. In fact he goes further, arguing that “From the twilight of primitive communism and the bourgeoning stratification of humanity, bureaucracy emerges as the administration of social relationships in societies divided into classes.”

Of course, there is some truth in this at a general level; after all, for Marxists the state itself is a product of the division of society in to classes. But this is next to useless for a historical analysis of changes in the trade unions over the last two centuries of capitalism.

In the 19th century it was absolutely necessary for the working class to fight for reforms like the shorter working day and the right to organise. This inevitably demanded an ever-increasing level of co-ordination in order to combat the organisation of employers and concentration of capital, but it was the very nature of the trade unions as permanent mass organisations within bourgeois society that created bureaucratic tendencies right from the beginning. This went hand in hand with a tendency for union leaderships to become wedded to peaceful, reformist methods of struggle; a tendency the bourgeoisie of course actively encouraged in order to prevent more dangerous class struggles.

The deepening nature of the capitalist crisis and the intensification of imperialist rivalries demanded ever greater sacrifices from the working class, but the Paris Commune clearly showed that it represented a growing revolutionary threat. Increasing state control was necessary not only to organise the national economy to compete in an increasingly saturated world market, but also to more effectively control the working class by incorporating its own organisations into the state apparatus. In return, the working class would receive minimal welfare benefits which would serve to tie it more effectively to national capitalist interests.  

The trade unions themselves - including those set up to defend unskilled workers - were strong supporters of state intervention on the basis that a healthy economy was the precondition for negotiating higher wages.  In an epoch of intensifying imperialist rivalries the logic of this position increasingly led the trade union bureaucracy to become the best defender of the national interest - and an implacable enemy of ‘disruptive’ workers’ struggles. 

Even before the first world war, revolutionaries themselves were able to identify this tendency towards the incorporation of the trade unions into the capitalist state and denounced the growth of oppressive state control disguised as social welfare measures. The outbreak of inter-imperialist warfare in 1914 and the massive increase in state control of society that ensued only confirmed this tendency. In Britain, for example, in 1917 one socialist workers’ leader concluded that:  "the trade union movement is tending to create a sort of organ of oppression within the masters' organ of oppression - the state - and an army of despotic union chiefs who are interested in reconciling, as far as possible, the interests of masters and men".[5]

Today, over 100 years after the first world war spectacularly confirmed the entry of capitalism into what the new Communist International announced in its Platform as “The epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat", we need to recognise that the nature of ‘bureaucratisation’ in the trade unions is qualitatively different, as described in the ICC pamphlet Trade Unions Against the Working Class [2]:

“What characterises bureaucracy is the fact that the life of the organisation is no longer rooted in the activity of its members but is artificially and formalistically carried on in its ‘bureaux’, in its central organs, and nowhere else. If such a phenomenon is common to all unions under decadent capitalism it is not because of the ‘malevolence’ of the union leaders; nor is bureaucratisation an inexplicable mystery. If bureaucracy has taken hold of the unions it is because the workers no longer support with any life or passion organisations which simply do not belong to them. The indifference the workers show towards trade union life is not, as the leftists think, a proof of the workers’ lack of consciousness. On the contrary it expresses a resigned consciousness within the working class of the unions’ inability to defend its class interests and even a consciousness that the unions belong to the class enemy.” (original emphasis)

The roots of the tendency towards state capitalism lie in the attempts of the system to avert its historic crisis of accumulation, ie. decadence – which may be why the comrade avoids any treatment of it in his text. The above is simply an attempt to briefly sketch out some of the connections between state capitalism, the emergence of a trade union bureaucracy and the nature of the trade unions as permanent mass organisations within bourgeois society; a sketch which hopefully shows up the inadequacies of the comrade’s arguments about ‘bureaucracy’ and the need to develop the discussion in this area.

The intervention of revolutionaries

The stated aim of the comrade in writing this text is to identify “a legitimate socialist practice”. The exact nature of this practice is not spelled out in the text but the comrade’s main argument is that despite the anti-working class policies of the union leaderships the trade unions remain working class organisations (or, at least, he argues that they still have ‘legitimacy’ in the class, in other words, workers still believe them to be their own organisations). It is therefore necessary to wage “a political struggle in the trade unions”.

But a political struggle for what? To win over the union leaderships and turn the unions back into real workers’ organisations? Or to warn the working class against the dangerous role of the trade unions and support all moves towards the generalisation and self-organisation of the workers’ struggles?

Let’s take a concrete example: the mass strikes in Poland in 1980-81, when the workers were organising themselves, extending their struggles, holding assemblies, electing delegates and creating inter-factory committees to co-ordinate and make their actions more effective. One of the first blows against this real class movement was the transformation of the inter-factory committees into a new union, which became Solidarnosc. This is how the ICC drew the lessons at the time:

“The actions of Solidarnosc in 1980 and 1981 demonstrated that, even when formally separated from the capitalist state, new unions, started from scratch, with millions of determined members and enjoying the confidence of the working class, act the same as official, bureaucratic state unions. As with unions everywhere else in the world, Solidarnosc (and the demands for ‘free trade unions’ that preceded its foundation) acted to sabotage struggles, demobilise and discourage workers and divert their discontent into the dead-ends of ‘self-management’, defence of the national economy and defence of the unions rather than workers’ interests.” (‘Poland 1980: Lessons still valid for the struggles of the world proletariat’, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/103_poland80.htm [3])

What lessons would the comrade draw from this experience for the intervention of revolutionaries in the workers’ struggles? This may seem an abstract question today in the absence of mass strikes and when the working class is still finding great difficulties in responding to the global attacks of capital, but in future waves of struggle it will be vital to warn workers against the sabotage of the trade unions. When asked whether he believes that there will be any need for the working class to break – politically and organisationally - with the existing trade unions at some point in its struggle against capitalism, the comrade responded:

“No; but not as a political choice (…) the class struggle exists regardless of the activity or inactivity of the socialist movement, and we can’t alter the fundamental processes of labor’s class struggles under the capitalist social relation but can only understand and then use them to abolish capitalism … ‘We’ can influence labor’s class struggles through to the abolition of the class struggle, but can’t alter the basic content of the class struggle.”

On the contrary, not only is it necessary for revolutionaries today to warn the working class that the trade unions are enemies of their struggles, but, if workers are to take these struggles forward across all boundaries of trade, sector, race, gender and above all nationality, it will be necessary to break from the straightjacket of union control and take the struggle into their own hands. 

It’s not accidental that the comrade appears to be drawing on Bordigist ideas for his theory. We can see this, for example, in his unqualified quote from the Bordigist PCI (Partito) on its attempts to ‘re-conquer’ the unions. The confusions of Bordigism have been  criticised many times by the ICC and others. Very briefly, when the Internationalist Communist Party was formed in Italy in 1943-45 the tendency around Bordiga rejected the position developed by the fraction of the Italian Left in exile that the trade unions had become incorporated into the capitalist state. In effect, the Bordigist current rejected the conclusion that capitalism had entered into its epoch of imperialist decay and that this had major implications for the trade union question, regressing on the union question to the positions of Lenin and the Second Congress of the Third International and continuing to argue that, despite being under reactionary leaders, the unions were still class organisations. 

On the trade union question as with others (for example national liberation), Bordigism therefore defends what we can characterise as opportunist and centrist positions and it would be helpful for the discussion if the comrade could clarify the extent to which he is explicitly defending a Bordigist political orientation.

Soviets and trade unions

Finally, let’s look at the comrade’s vision of revolution, which is based on the idea that ultimately the working class organised in trade unions seizes state power, after which it will exercise its dictatorship through trade unions. As he puts it: “This bureaucracy of the workers state differs in no way from that of the trade unions, in composition, character or function …Proletarian dictatorship is in perfect continuity with classical trade unionism…”

There are many issues with this vision – not least whether the working class can identify itself with the state that exists after it has seized power – but is it based on the historical experience of the working class?

If we take the example of the October Revolution - which after all is the only experience of the proletariat seizing political power on a national scale - through a few highly selective quotes the comrade gives the impression that it was the trade unions that made the revolution and formed the dictatorship of the proletariat.

So why in 1917 did Lenin and the Bosheviks take up the slogan “All power to the soviets!” – a slogan that was already being adopted by the most class conscious Russian workers - and not “All power to the trade unions”? And why did the Third International in 1920 affirm that “The authentic soviets of the masses are the historically-elaborated forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat”?[6]

The comrade’s ‘core theory’ is that “trade unionism appears as the content of labor’s class struggles under the capitalist social relation.” His text hardly mentions soviets or workers’ councils and where it does he gives the impression that they are simply a form of trade unionism in a period of revolutionary struggles. But if we examine even briefly the experience of the working class we can see this isn’t true.

The first appearance of soviets - unprepared and unpredicted by revolutionaries at the time – was a practical demonstration that the period of capitalism's ascendency, in which the proletariat had been able to constitute permanent mass organisations (particularly trade unions), to fight for reforms of the system, was nearing its end. The working class itself found the weapons it needed to struggle against capital in the new conditions created by the system’s decline; a struggle not just for immediate demands but ultimately for the destruction of the bourgeois state. These weapons were the mass strike and the formation of soviets or workers’ councils. Unlike the trade unions, soviets regrouped the majority of the workers in struggle, assemblies of delegates mandated by general assemblies of workers;  but above all, they were political organs, forged in the heat of generalised mass struggles, whose fundamental objective was to prepare for the seizure of power.

The problem for the comrade’s theory is that any attempt to seriously address the role of the soviets in history would not only highlight these differences but also the change in the historic conditions for the class struggle at the start of the 20th century which gave rise to these political organs in the first place.

Taking the discussion forward

Having set out to provide an alternative Marxist theory of the nature of trade unionism directed “against the core left communist theories of the class struggle”, and specifically against the position that the trade unions have become integrated into the capitalist state, the comrade has come up with a theoretical approach that studiously avoids addressing the most significant changes in the conditions for the proletariat’s struggle over the last hundred years. 

His attempt to clarify his political differences by developing such an alternative theory is a real sign of seriousness. But at the same time it may have served to exaggerate these differences and highlight the flaws in his basic approach. The political movement we know as ‘left communism’ is after all only the struggle the left of the communist movement – historically always the most intransigent and clear-sighted fraction of the workers’ movement – to defend the revolutionary content of Marxism in the new epoch of capitalist decadence, and in particular to draw out the most important political implications for the workers’ struggles. This struggle was in direct continuity with that of the left in the Second International against opportunism and centrism and in defence of internationalism, and of the Marxist tendency in the First International: the struggle to defend the historical materialist understanding of capitalism as an historically transitory society; the struggle against the rise of reformism in the workers’ movement; the implications of the rise of imperialism and the appearance of the mass strike…  

Any attempt to devise ‘new’ theories without clear reference to all these links in the chain risks throwing throwing the baby out with the bath water and we can see signs of this in the comrade’s text: on reformism, decadence, the mass strike, soviets…

To take this discussion forward, it may be better instead to focus on the comrade’s specific criticisms of the positions of the ICC and their implications for the role and intervention of revolutionaries. After all, the fact that the ICC defends the position that the trade unions have been integrated into the capitalist state does not in any way mean that revolutionaries ignore workers’ struggles that take place under union control, or that our only intervention is to stand up and denounce the unions as bourgeois. The ICC pamphlet on the trade unions includes a whole section on the intervention of revolutionaries that could act as the starting point for a perhaps more fruitful discussion.

MH (this response was contributed by a close sympathiser of the ICC)

In the twilight of ancient Rome, the madness of emperors was more the rule than the exception. Few historians doubt that this was a sign of Rome’s decrepitude. Today a scary clown is made king in the world’ s most powerful nation state, and yet this is not generally understood as a sign that capitalist civilisation has itself reached an advanced stage in its own decadence. The surge of populism in the epicentres of the system, which has brought in quick succession Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump, expresses the fact that the ruling class is losing its grip over the political machinery that, for many decade now, has been used to hold back capitalism’s innate tendency towards collapse. We are witnessing an enormous political crisis brought about by the accelerating decomposition of the social order, by the complete inability of the ruling class to offer humanity a perspective for the future. But populism is also a product of the inability of the exploited class, the proletariat, to put forward a revolutionary alternative, with the result that it is grave danger of being dragged into a reaction based on impotent rage, on fear, on the scapegoating of minorities and a delusional quest for a past that never really existed. This analysis of the roots of populism as a global phenomenon is developed in more depth in the contribution ‘On the question of populism [12]’ and we encourage our readers to examine the general framework it offers, along with our initial more specific response to the Brexit result and the rise of Trump’s candidacy, ‘Brexit, Trump: setbacks for the ruling class, nothing good for the proletariat [13]’. Both texts are published in n°157 of our International Review.

We have also published an article by our sympathiser in the US, Henk: ‘Trump v. Clinton: nothing but bad choices for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat [14]’. This article, written in early October, looked at the almost frantic efforts of the more ‘responsible’ factions of the US bourgeoisie, both Democrat and Republican, to stop Trump from getting to the White House1. These efforts evidently failed, and one of the more immediate factors which brought about this failure was the incredible intervention by the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, at the very point where Clinton seemed to be surging ahead in the polls. The FBI, the very heart of the US security apparatus, severely damaged Clinton’s chances by announcing that she may well have a criminal case to answer after it had further investigated her use of private email servers, which goes against the basic rules of state security. A week or so later, Comey tried to backtrack by announcing that, in fact, there was nothing untoward in all the material the Bureau had examined. But the damage had been done and the FBI had made a major contribution to the Trump campaign, whose rallies have endlessly chanted the slogan ‘Lock Her Up’. The FBI’s intervention was yet another expression of a growing loss of political control at the centre of the state apparatus.

Communists don’t fight for the lesser evil

The article ‘Trump v. Clinton’ begins by clearly re-stating the communist position on bourgeois democracy and elections in this epoch of history: that they are a gigantic fraud which offers no choice for the working class. This lack of choice was perhaps more pronounced than ever in this election, fought between the arrogant showman Trump, with his overtly racist and misogynist agenda, and Clinton, who embodies the ‘neo-liberal’ order that has been the dominant form of state capitalism for the last three decades. Faced with a choice between two evils, a substantial part of the electorate, as is always the case in US elections, did not vote at all - an initial estimate gives the turn out as just under 57%, lower than in 2012 [15] despite all the pressures to go out and vote. At the same time, many who were critical of both camps, but of Trump in particular, decided to vote for Hillary as the lesser of the two evils. For our part, we know that abstaining from bourgeois elections out of disillusionment with what’s on offer is at best only the beginning of wisdom: it is essential, though extremely difficult when the working class is not acting as a class, to show that there is another way of organising society which will pass through the dismantling of the capitalist state. And in the post-election period, this rejection of the existing political and social order, this insistence on the necessity for the working class to fight for its own interests outside and against the prison of the bourgeois state, will be no less relevant, because many will be drawn towards a simple anti-Trumpism, a kind of revamped anti-fascism2 which will again align itself with more ‘democratic’ factions of the bourgeoisie – most probably with those which talk the language of the working class and of socialism, as Bernie Sanders did during the Democratic primaries3

Trumpism’s social base

This is not the place to analyse in detail the motives and social composition of those who voted for Trump. There is no doubt that the misogyny, the anti-woman rhetoric so central to the Trump campaign, played its part and it needs to be studied in itself, especially as it is part of a much more global ‘male backlash’ against the social and ideological changes in gender relations during the last few decades. In the same way, there has been a sinister growth of racism and xenophobia in all the central capitalist countries, and this played a key role in Trump’s campaign. There are also particular elements to racism in America which need to be understood: in the short term, reaction to the Obama presidency and to the American version of the ‘migrant crisis’, in the longer term, the whole heritage of slavery and segregation. From the early figures, the long history of the racial divide in America can be discerned in the fact that the pro-Trump vote was overwhelmingly white (although it did mobilise a rather significant number of ‘Hispanics’) while around 88% of black voters chose the Clinton camp. We will return to these questions in future articles.

But as we argue in the contribution on populism, we think that perhaps the most important element in the Trump victory was rage against the neo-liberal ‘elite’ which has identified itself with the globalisation and financialisation of the economy – macro-economic processes which have enriched a small minority at the expense of the majority, and above all at the expense of the working class in the old manufacturing and extractive industries. ‘Globalisation’ has meant the wholesale dismantling of manufacturing industries and their transfer to countries like China where labour power is far cheaper and profits are thus much higher. It has also meant the ‘free movement of labour’, which for capitalism is another means to cheapen labour power through migration from ‘poorer’ to ‘richer’ countries. Financialisation has meant, for the majority, the domination of economic life by the increasingly mysterious laws of the market. More concretely it meant the 2008 crash which ruined so many small investors and aspiring house-owners.

Again, more detailed statistical studies are needed, but it does appear that a core strength of the Trump campaign was the support it won from non-college educated whites, and especially from workers in the ‘Rust Belt’, the new industrial deserts who voted for Trump as a protest against the established political order, personified in the so-called ‘metropolitan liberal elite’. Many of these same workers or regions had voted for Obama in the previous elections, and some supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. Their vote was above all a vote against – against the growing inequality of wealth, against a system which they felt has deprived them and their children of any future. But this opposition was framed in the complete absence of a real working class movement, and has thus fed the populist world-view which blames the elite for selling out the country to foreign investors, to giving special privileges to migrants, refugees and ethnic minorities at the expense of the ‘native’ working class – and to women workers at the expense of male workers. The racist and misogynist elements of Trumpism thus go hand in hand with the rhetorical attacks on the ‘elite’.

Trump in power: no smooth ride

We won’t speculate about what Trump’s presidency will be like or what policies he will try to implement. What characterises Trump above all is his unpredictability, so it will not be easy to foresee the consequences of his reign. There is also the fact that while Trump can say a dozen contradictory things before breakfast, and that this didn’t seem to affect his support in the election campaign, what worked in the campaign may not work so well in office. So for example, Trump presents himself as the archetypal self-made entrepreneur and talks about liberating the American businessman from bureaucracy, but he also talks about a massive programme of restoring the infrastructure in the inner cities, of building roads, schools and hospitals and revitalising the fossil fuels industry by abolishing environmental protection limits, all of which implies a heavy state capitalist intervention in the economy. He is pledged to expel millions of illegal immigrants, and yet much of the US economy depends on their cheap labour. On foreign policy, he combines the language of isolationism and withdrawal (as in his threat to scale down US involvement in NATO) with the language of interventionism, as with his bluster about ‘bombing the hell out of IS’, while promising to increase the military budget.

What seems certain is that Trump’s presidency will be marked by conflict, both within the ruling class and between the state and society. It’s true that Trump’s victory speech was a model of reconciliation – he will be a ‘president for all Americans’. And Obama, before receiving Trump at the White House, said that he wanted to ensure as smooth a transition as possible. In addition, the fact that there is now a large Republican majority in Senate and Congress could mean- if the Republican establishment overcomes its antipathy for Trump – that he will be able to get their backing for a number of his policies, even if the more demagogic ones may be put in the pending tray. But the signs of future tensions and clashes are not hard to see. Parts of the military hierarchy, for example, are likely to be very hostile to some of his foreign policy options, if he persists in his scepticism about NATO, or translates his admiration for Putin as a strong leader into undermining US attempts to counter the dangerous resurgence of Russian imperialism in eastern Europe and the Middle East. Opposition to some of his domestic policies could also arise from within the security apparatus, the federal bureaucracy and big business interests, who might see it as their role to ensure that Trump is not allowed to run amok. Meanwhile, the political demise of the ‘Clinton dynasty’ may also give rise to new oppositions and perhaps even splits within the Democratic Party, with the likely rise of a left wing around the likes of Bernie Sanders, hoping to capitalise on the mood of hostility to economic and political establishments.

At the social level, if post-Brexit Britain is anything to go by, we are likely to see a sinister flowering of ‘popular’ xenophobia as overtly racist groups feel that they are now empowered to realise their fantasies of violence and domination; at the same time police repression against ethnic minorities may reach new heights. And if Trump seriously begins his programme of detaining and expelling the ‘illegals’, all these developments could provoke resistance in the streets, in continuity with some of the movements we have been seeing in the last few years following police murders of black people. Indeed, from the very day the election result was announced, there has been a series of very angry demonstrations in cities across America, generally involving young people who feel disgusted at the prospect of a Trump-led government.

The international impact

At the international level, Trump’s victory is set to be, as he himself put it, ‘Brexit plus plus plus’. It has already given a powerful boost to right wing populist parties in western Europe, not least the Front National in France where the presidential election is due in 2017. These are parties who want to withdraw from multi-national trade organisations and favour economic protectionism. With Trump’s most aggressive statements being directed against Chinese economic competition, this could mean that we are heading towards a trade war which, as in the 1930s, will further constrict an already clogged-up world market. The neo-liberal model has served world capitalism well over the last two decades, but it is now approaching its limits, and what lies ahead bears the danger of transferring the ‘every man for himself’ tendency we have seen at the imperialist level to the economic sphere, where it has so far been held more or less in check. Trump has also declared that global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese to support their export drive, and says he will pull out of all the existing international agreements on climate change. We know how limited these agreements are already, but scrapping them is likely to plunge us even more deeply into the mounting world ecological disaster.

We repeat: Trump symbolises a bourgeoisie which has truly lost any perspective for running society. For all his vanity and narcissism, he is not mad himself, but he embodies the madness of a system which is running out of options, even that of world war. Despite its decadence, the ruling class has, for over a century, been able to use its own political and military apparatus – in other words, its conscious intervention as a class – to prevent a complete loss of control, a final working out of capitalism’s innate drive towards chaos. We are now beginning to see the limits of this control, even if we shouldn’t underestimate our enemy’s capacity to come up with new temporary fixes. The problem for our class is that the evident bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie at all levels – economic, political, moral – is not, with the exception of a very small minority, generating a revolutionary critique of the system but rather misdirected rage and poisonous divisions in our own ranks. This poses a serious threat to the future possibility of replacing capitalism with a human society.

And yet one of the reasons why world war is not on the agenda today, despite the severity of capitalism’s crisis, is that the working class has not been defeated in open combat and still contains untapped capacities for resistance, as we have seen in various massive movements during the last decade, such as the French students’ struggle in 2006 or the ‘Indignados’ revolt in Spain in 2011 and the Occupy movement in the US in the same year. In America, these heralds of resistance can be discerned in the protests against police murders and the post-election demonstrations against Trump, although these movements have not taken on a clear working class character and are vulnerable to recuperation by the professional politicians of the left, by different varieties of nationalist or democratic ideology. For the working class to overcome both the populist menace and the false alternatives sold by the left wing of capital, something much deeper is required, a movement for proletarian independence which is able to understand itself politically and re-connect with the communist traditions of our class. This is not for the immediate, but revolutionaries have a role today in preparing such a development, above all by fighting for the political and theoretical clarity that can light a way through the prevailing smog of capitalist ideology, in all its guises.

Amos 13.11.16

If you were to ask a high school student about the Russian revolution of 1917, most likely she would reply that it was a Bolshevik coup which, despite the good intentions of its protagonists, ended up in a nightmare: the Soviet dictatorship, the Gulag, etc.

And if you to ask her what happened on 15 May 2011, it’s possible that the response would be that it was a movement for ‘real democracy’ and that it was very closely linked to the Podemos political party[1].

Anyone who is looking for the truth will not be satisfied with such simplistic answers, which have nothing to do with what really happened, stuffed as they are with the ‘common sense’ views promoted by the deformed education we are subjected to and the brow beating of the ‘means of communication’. In short, by the dominant ideology of this society.

It’s true that the proletariat is today in a situation of profound weakness. But the history of society is the history of the class struggle, and the capitalist state knows very well that the proletariat could one day return to the struggle. This is why it attacks it at its most vulnerable points, and one of these is its historical memory. The bourgeoisie has a great interest in destroying this memory by re-writing the past experience of our class. It’s as if it was trying to format the hard disc and reinstall a very different programme. 

The most intelligent form of rewriting is to take advantage of the real weaknesses and mistakes of proletarian movements. These always carry with them a whole burden of errors which posterity can then rewrite in ways diametrically opposed to what they originally stood for.

Marx, commenting on the difference between the struggle of the bourgeoisie and the struggle of the proletariat, argued that

“Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success... On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals.”[2]

This is why, for the proletariat

 “its thorny way to self-emancipation is paved not only with immeasurable suffering but also with countless errors. The aim of its journey – its emancipation depends on this – is whether the proletariat can learn from its own errors. Self-criticism, remorseless, cruel, and going to the core of things is the life’s breath and light of the proletarian movement.” [3]

The aim of this article is not to make a critical analysis of the 1917 revolution. We only want to go back over the movement of the Indignados in 2011, the ‘15 May’ movement[4] and the way it has been ‘rewritten’ by the ideology of the ruling class.

2003-2011: new generations of the proletariat enter the struggle

After the long night of the counter-revolution which crushed the revolution of 1917, the proletariat revived its struggles in 1968. But this revival was not able to politicise itself in a revolutionary direction. In 1989, the fall of the so-called ‘Communist’ regimes resulted in an important retreat in consciousness and combativity whose effects can still be felt today[5]. 

From 2003, there was a new upsurge of struggles, but they mainly involved the new generations of the working class (students, unemployed, precarious workers), while the workers of the big industrial centres remained passive, only engaging in sporadic struggles (the fear of unemployment was a major inhibition). There was no unified and massive mobilisation of the working class, but only of a part of it, the youngest part. The revolt of young people in Greece (2008), the movements in Tunisia and Egypt (2011) were in this sense the expression of a wave whose highest points were the fight against the CPE in France (2006) and the 15 May movement.[6]

Despite their positive and promising aspects (we will come back to this later), these movements took place in a context in which the working class was losing its sense of identity and confidence in its own strength. This loss of identity meant that the great majority of those who took part in the struggles didn’t see themselves as being part of the working class, but rather as citizens, Even when they talked about being ‘at the bottom of the pile’ and about being treated as ‘second class’, they didn’t break the umbilical cord with the ‘community’ of the nation.

As we wrote in 2011: “Although the slogan of ‘we are the 99% against the 1%’, which was so popular in the occupation movement in the United States, reveals the beginnings of an understanding of the bloody class divisions that affect us, the majority of participants in these protests saw themselves as ‘active citizens’ who want to be recognized within a society of ‘free and equal citizens’”. This prevented the participants from seeing that “society is divided into classes: a capitalist class that has everything and produces nothing, and an exploited class -the proletariat- that produces everything but has less and less. The driving force of social evolution is not the democratic game of the “decision of a majority of citizens” (this game is nothing more than a masquerade which covers up and legitimises the dictatorship of the ruling class) but the class struggle”[7].

There were thus two fundamental weaknesses within the 15 May movement, which mutually reinforced each other and which made their current falsification possible: most of their protagonists saw themselves as citizens and were aspiring to a renewal of the democratic game.

Because of this, the movement, despite its promising beginnings, was not articulated around “the struggle of the principle exploited class -the proletariat- who collectively produce the main riches and ensure the functioning of social life: factories, hospitals, schools, universities, offices, ports, construction, post offices.”[8], but ended up being diluted in a powerless protest of ‘indignant’ citizens. Despite some tentative efforts to extend the movement to the workplaces, this was a failure, and the movement was increasingly restricted to the city squares. Despite the sympathy that it inspired, it more and more lost its strength until it was reduced to a minority that succumbed to a desperate kind of activism.

Furthermore, the difficulty of recognising itself as a class movement was reinforced by the lack of confidence in its own strengths. This gave a disproportionate weight to the elements of the radicalised petty bourgeoisie which joined the movement, thus boosting confusion, inter-classism, and belief in the worst formulas of bourgeois politics, such as ‘no more two party system’, ‘fight against corruption’ etc.

These social strata contaminated the movement with an ideology which reduced capitalism to “a handful of ‘bad guys’  (unscrupulous financiers, ruthless dictators) when it is really a complex network of social relations that have to be attacked in their totality and not dissipated into a preoccupation with its many surface expressions (finance, speculation, the corruption of political -economic powers”[9]

Despite some attempts at solidarity based on mass action against police violence, it was the idea of struggle as a form of peaceful pressure by citizens on the institutions of capitalism that very easily led the movement into a dead end.

The ‘Nuit Debout’ movement takes on the worst of 15 May

As our section in France has pointed out, “there was nothing spontaneous about Nuit Debout. It’s something which has been prepared and organised over a long period by the radical defenders of capitalism. Behind this “spontaneous” and “apolitical” movement lurk the professionals, the groups of the left and extreme left who use “apoliticism” as a means of control.” [10]

The aim of this set-up was to imprison social discontent and all discussion “in the optic of citizenship and republican values, and diverting reflection to the problem of making capitalism more human and democratic”[11]. As a leaflet by the collective which animated the movement, ‘Convergence des Luttes’ put it, “humanity must be at the heart of the concerns of our leaders”.

This pious wish simply reiterates the reactionary utopia where governments are really concerned with human beings. But this only serves to hide their real concern, which are the problems and necessities of capital. Asking the state to defend the interests of the exploited is like asking a burglar to look after your house.

The demands put forward by Nuit Debout all go towards sowing the illusion that a capitalist system which is fleecing us more and more can still offer something. A ‘universal basic income’ is called for, healthier food, more money for education and other ‘reforms’ which are always part of electoral promises and which are never kept.

The most ‘ambitious’ demand put forward by the promoters of Nuit Debout is the call for a ‘social republic’, which is seen as going back to the ‘revolutionary ideas of 1789’, when the bourgeoisie demolished the feudal power to cries of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. This is the reactionary utopia of the “’true democracy’ promised by the French revolution of 1789. But what was revolutionary two and half centuries ago, i.e. installing the political power of the bourgeoisie in France, overcoming feudalism by the development of capitalism, building a nation…all this today has become irredeemably reactionary. This system of exploitation is decadent. It’s not a question of making it better, because that has become impossible, but of going beyond it, of overthrowing it through an international proletarian revolution. But here the illusion is being sewn that the state is a neutral agent on which we have to put pressure, or even protect from the shareholders, the corrupt politicians, the greedy bankers, the oligarchs…”[12]

The real antagonism, the one between capital and the proletariat, is replaced by an imaginary antagonism between, on the one hand, a corrupt minority of financiers and venal politicians, and, on the other side of the barricade, an immense majority which can include the good politicians, the honest capitalists, the soldiers, the people, the citizens. In this scenario the proletariat abandons its class ground and submerges itself in a conflict between all good citizens and a handful of bad guys.  

What’s more, just as the populism of Trump or the Front National blames everything on certain people and not on the social relations of production, the ‘radicals’ of Nuit Debout also put forward a project based on personalisation. The right puts the blame on migrants; the left on a few bankers or politicians. But it’s the same reactionary logic. The problems of the world can be resolved by getting rid of a few people who are seen as the root of all evil.

What is left of 15 May?

The promoters of Nuit Debout have wiped out the hard disc of the 15 May movement and written over it. But what really remains of this movement? What can we hold onto for future struggles?

The assemblies

We reproduce here what we wrote in our international leaflet drawing the lessons of the Indignados, Occupy and other movements:

“The mass assembles have concretised the slogan of the First International (1864) ‘The emancipation of the working class is the work of the workers themselves or it is nothing’. This is the continuation of the tradition of the workers' movement stretching back to the Paris Commune, and to Russia in 1905 and 1917, where it took an ever higher form, continued in Germany 1918, Hungary 1919 and 1956, Poland 1980.” [13]

The assemblies of the future will have to strengthen themselves by drawing a critical balance sheet of the weaknesses in the assemblies of 2011:

• Only a small minority of them were extended to the workplaces, the neighbourhoods, the unemployed…even though the central nucleus of the assemblies does have to be the general assembly of the city, based on the occupation of public squares and buildings, they have to be fed by a wider network of assemblies, especially in the factories and workplaces;
• The commissions (coordination, culture, actions, etc) have to be under the strict control of the general assembly and have to be scrupulously accountable to them. We have to avoid what happened in the 15 May movement where the commissions became instruments for sabotaging the assemblies by shadowy groups like ‘Real Democracy Now’[14].

Solidarity

Through all its pores, capitalist society secretes “marginalisation, the atomisation of the individual, the destruction of family relationships, the exclusion of old people from social life, the annihilation of love and affection and its replacement by pornography,”. In sum, “the destruction of the very principle of collective life in a society devoid of the slightest project or perspective.”[15]

A barbaric expression of this social decomposition is the hatred towards immigrants encouraged by populism, which won a spectacular victory with ‘Brexit’ in the United Kingdom and Trump’s election in the USA.

Against all of that, the 15 May movement and Occupy sowed the first seeds of something different

“The demonstrations in Madrid called for the freeing of those who have been arrested or have stopped the police detaining immigrants; there have been massive actions against evictions in Spain, Greece and the United States; in Oakland ‘The strike Assembly has agreed to send pickets or to occupy any company or school that punishes employees or students in anyway for taking part in the General Strike of the 2nd November’. Vivid but still episodic moments have happened, when everyone can feel protected and defended by those around them. All of which starkly contrasted with what is ‘normal’ in this society with its anguished sense of hopelessness and vulnerability”[16].

However, this very important experience could be overwhelmed and buried by the present populist wave (which is supported by politicians who present themselves as ‘antagonists’ to the ‘elite’). Proletarian solidarity still has to put down firmer roots[17]

The culture of debate

This society condemns us to inertia in work and consumption, endlessly reproducing alienated models of success and failure, manufacturing stereotypes which reinforce the dominant ideology. In the face of this, all sorts of false responses serve to further deepen social and moral putrefaction:

“ -   the profusion of sects, the renewal of the religious spirit including in the advanced countries, the rejection of rational, coherent thought even amongst certain “scientists”; a phenomenon which dominates the media with their idiotic shows and mind-numbing advertising;

• the invasion of the same media by the spectacle of violence, horror, blood, massacres, even in programmes designed for children;
• the vacuity and venality of all “artistic” production: literature, music, painting, architecture, are unable to express anything but anxiety, despair, the breakdown of coherent thought, the void”

[18].

Against these two poles of capitalist alienation, movements like the 15 May or Occupy “thousands of people began to look for an authentic popular culture, making it for themselves, trying to animate their own critical and independent criteria. The crisis and its causes, the role of the banks etc, have been exhaustively discussed. There has been discussion of revolution, although with much confusion; there has been talk of democracy and dictatorship, synthesised in these two complementary slogans ‘they call it democracy and it is no’” and ‘it is a dictatorship but unseen’”. These were the first steps towards a real politics of the majority, far away from the world of intrigues, lies and shady manoeuvres which characterise the politics of the ruling class. A politics which raises all the questions that affect us, not just economics and politics but also the environment, ethics, culture, education and health”[19]

The importance of this effort, however tentative, however weakened by democratist and petty bourgeois illusions, is obvious. Every revolutionary movement of the proletariat can only be based on mass discussion, on a cultural movement founded on free and independent debate.

The vertebral column of the Russian revolution of 1917 was this culture of massive debate

“The thirst for education, so long held back, was concerted by the revolution into a true delirium. During the first six months, tons of literature, whether onhandcarts or wagons, poured forth from the Smolny Institute each day, Russia insatiably absorbed it, like hot sand absorbs water. This was not pulp novels, falsified history, diluted religion or cheap fiction that corrupts, but economic and social theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, Gorky”[20]   

Concern for an international struggle

The proletariat is an international class with the same interests in all countries. The workers have no country, and nationalism, in all its varieties, is the graveyard of any possible perspective for the liberation of humanity.

Capitalism today is assailed by a contradiction: on the one hand, the economy is more and more global, production is more and more inter-dependent. But on the other hand, all states are imperialist and wars are increasingly destructive; the environment is deteriorating as competition between national states, especially the most powerful ones like the USA and China, gets sharper and sharper. As economic life becomes more and more international, there is a blind, irrational retreat into all kinds of false communities, whether national, racial or religious…

These contradictions can only be overcome through the historic struggle of the proletariat. The proletariat is the class of worldwide association. It produces across frontiers. It is a class of migrants, a melting pot of races, religions, cultures. No product, from a building to a threshing machine, can be made by an isolated community of workers stuck in a national or local framework. Production needs raw material, transport, machines, all of which circulate on a world scale. It can only be realised by workers trained in a universal culture, through incessant exchanges on an international level. The internet is not only a cultural instrument, but above all a means without which capitalist production would be impossible.

In 2011, expressing these realities and what they mean for the proletarian struggle, even if in a still vague manner, “this movement of indignation has spread internationally: to Spain, where the then Socialist government imposed one of the first and most draconian austerity plans; to Greece, the symbol of the crisis of sovereign debt; to the United States, the temple of world capitalism; to Egypt and Israel, focus of one of the worst and most entrenched imperialist conflicts, the Middle East.

The awareness that this is an international movement began to develop despite the destructive weight of nationalism, as seen in the presence of national flags in the demonstrations in Greece, Egypt or the USA. In Spain solidarity with the workers of Greece was expressed by slogans such as ‘Athens resists, Madrid rises up’. The Oakland strikers (USA, November,2011) said ‘Solidarity with the occupation movement world wide’. In Egypt it was agreed in the Cairo Declaration to support the movement in the United States. In Israel they shouted ‘Netanyahu, Mubarak, El Assad are the same’ and contacts were made with Palestinian workers”[21].

Today, five years on, these gains seem to have been buried deep underground. This is the expression of an inevitable feature of proletarian struggles which Marx referred to in the quote we put at the beginning of this article - that “they seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever”

But there is a vital task which the advanced minorities of the proletariat have to carry out: draw the lessons, place then in an evolving Marxist theoretical framework. This is the task we call on all committed comrades to address, to “start the most widespread possible discussion, without any restriction or discouragement, in order to consciously prepare new movements which could make it clear that capitalism can indeed be replaced by another society”[22].

Accion Proletaria ICC section in Spain, 6.7.16